Patricia Mohammed

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

The Caribbean is generally considered the islands and territories bounded on one or more shores by the Caribbean Sea, containing an archipelagic stretch of islands, from the Straits of Florida in the United States to the tip of the South American continent, and including the mainland territories of Belize, Suriname, and Guyana. A Caribbean palette incorporates a taste, a way of looking, a value system of what is considered beautiful, representative, or pleasing; an aesthetic sensibility, and feel, for these territories, not just the ways in which art and artistic representation lay down color and texture. It includes expectations that the viewer, whether internal or external to the region, has come to associate with Caribbean peoples. The term “visual palette” also refers to the range of colors and artistic expressions that are connected to the region as a result of its geography and climate, its tropical flora and fauna, the mixing of its ethnic and racial groups, and their religious practices. These elements have accumulated to a range of iconographic symbols derived from festivals, producing values, customs, and variations of shade, shape, and sound that, over time, have morphed into a Caribbean aesthetic, which, like all living cultures, continues to evolve each day.

The historical process by which culture has been created in this region—European colonial settlement of relatively unpopulated lands, displacing the indigenous groups from the 15th century onwards to the present—has affected the way in which the Caribbean has been represented over time. Post-colonial relations of dominance, among and between racialized groups in the different Caribbean territories, have signaled ideas that have demographic appeal. At the same time, there is no unified or shared acceptance of taste or formal values of what is fully representative of the Caribbean visual standpoint, either within societies or between and among them. In an area that contains Anglophone, Hispanophone, Francophone, and Dutch Antillean languages, as well as countless dialects, there are barriers to communication that make for inhibited fluidities or sharing. Nonetheless, due to commonalities of history and topography, there has evolved a uniqueness, perhaps, of color or subject matter that resonates with the Caribbean visual experience. This article examines some selected elements of the different aesthetics produced within this region and explores how these have emerged to create a sensibility that is understood loosely as Caribbean.

Anita Casavantes Bradford and Raúl Fernandez

The years between 1989 and 2005 were a period of exceptional musical productivity and creativity, a “second golden age” of Cuban popular music—the first golden age referring to the 1950s ...
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The years between 1989 and 2005 were a period of exceptional musical productivity and creativity, a “second golden age” of Cuban popular music—the first golden age referring to the 1950s explosion of the mambo and the cha-cha-chá. During this more recent golden age multiple and diverse forms of musical expression gained traction, and island artists enjoyed a dramatic increase in international visibility. The exciting new sounds of timba and Latin jazz, the Buena Vista Social Club–styled reinvention of the son cubano, and the reemergence of música guajira during the 1990s all reflected the dynamic tensions between tradition and innovation, the local and global, and between an imaginary “authentic” and the much denigrated “commercial” that have long animated the island’s extraordinary musical culture. Despite the seeming newness and singularity of much of the music produced during this period, this second golden age was in fact characterized as much by cross-genre collaboration and continuities with earlier trends in Cuban music and musical culture as by the impact on musical production of unprecedented circumstances of economic deprivation of those years known as the Special Period. A closer look at this second golden age of popular music reveals a cosmopolitan Cuban musical landscape in which styles from different periods coexisted with ease and remained relevant, both as distinct sounds and in dialogue with one another, bringing together a dynamic community of musicians of all levels and styles, old and young, on and off the island. Dynamically poised between the forces of tradition and innovation, and beloved by both local and global audiences, the artists who rose to prominence or were rediscovered during these years each spoke, in their own unique ways, to the innovation, the cross genre collaborations, and above all to the profound historical continuities that have long animated the island’s extraordinary musical culture.

April Yoder

Record-setting Dominican attendance at the championship game of the 1969 Amateur Baseball World Series attested to the local and international stakes in the competition between the United ...
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Record-setting Dominican attendance at the championship game of the 1969 Amateur Baseball World Series attested to the local and international stakes in the competition between the United States and Cuba. Both teams reached the final game of the round-robin tournament, having defeated all nine of the opposing teams representing nations and government systems as varied as Nicaragua’s rightest dictatorship, the Dutch Antilles’ constitutional commonwealth, and Venezuela’s guerrilla-threatened democracy. Dominican sportswriters described the game as a competition between two opposing government systems and two conflicting sporting systems: the decentralized, largely privatized U.S. system that used amateur ball as a stepping stone to professionalism and the Cuban system that developed state amateurs who educated themselves, worked, and played ball in the service of the nation. The meeting between the U.S. and Cuban teams in the Dominican Republic suggested that the systems might coexist at a time when the Dominican government headed by President Joaquín Balaguer began to experiment with new models for political and economic development. Balaguer used the domestic openness and conciliatory attitude toward Cuba to legitimate controversial economic policies and submerge political discontent through national projects around international events like the Amateur World Series in 1969 and the XII Central American and Caribbean Games in 1974. With the international stage provided by the sporting events, Balaguer offered his Third Way as a model for Latin America. This local pluralism, though brief and perhaps disingenuous, allowed Balaguer to project himself and the Dominican Republic as leaders in a movement for Latin America solidarity built on pluralism and respect for sovereignty.

Christian Krohn-Hansen

The colmado, or the small village or street-corner store, is a Dominican institution. It is typically a general store for basic foodstuffs, cleaning products, toiletries, soft drinks, ...
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The colmado, or the small village or street-corner store, is a Dominican institution. It is typically a general store for basic foodstuffs, cleaning products, toiletries, soft drinks, beer, and rum. When Dominicans from the early 1960s onward started migrating to New York City in large numbers, they took with them a version of the colmado. On the way, they altered the original colmado. The result became the “Dominican” bodega or corner grocer’s in New York City, a new type but nevertheless not so unlike the colmado on the island. This essay explores the making and remaking of Dominican colmados and bodegas. The goal is twofold: firstly, to provide some answers to the questions “How have these businesses been created and run?” and “What are their most important and most striking characteristics?” and, secondly, to demonstrate that the Dominican colmado can be good to think with—more specifically, the hope is to show that the problematic of “the Dominican colmado / the Dominican bodega” offers a window for tracing and understanding in which ways the Dominican social formation has changed since the mid-20th century, that is, since the last years of the Trujillo regime. The patterns of the colmados and bodegas have mirrored broader historical transformations. But these businesses have also helped give the latter processes their form. Businesses and social configurations have been two sides of the same historical process.

Frederick Luciani

The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a ...
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The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a prodigious number of poems and letters, which are the subject of an ongoing scholarly project undertaken by Frederick Luciani of Colgate University. Luciani’s work involves more than translating these poems and letters into English—it examines Heredia’s stay in North America against the background of political and historical events, and traces the matrices of his connections with key figures, literary and otherwise, in Cuba and the United States. Questions that have surfaced through the translation process and scrutiny of this period of Heredia’s life include the relationship between Heredia’s poetry and his letters; the value of his letters as a form of travel literature; the contradictions inherent in his exilic condition; the ambiguity of his political sentiments; the nature of the networks that joined 19th-century Anglo-American and Hispanic writers, translators, and scholars; and the challenges and opportunities that Heredia’s life and work pose for readers, translators, and scholars today.

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